Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is more retro than it needed to be

For a certain niche, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is going to push their buttons, bigtime.

Specifically, for those who grew up with Nintendo’s first major games console, the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System, and have access to likeminded friends and family up for competitive multiplayer, this Switch challenge collection is a genuine local multiplayer hit.

However, for solo players and those looking to compete with others online, it offers less than we would’ve liked from a modern retro-challenge compilation. World Championships has plenty of content, and its charm is undeniable, but it’s difficult not to feel that it’s also lacking in crucial areas, even in light of its reduced $30 price point.

Unlike Nintendo’s previous NES compilations, like the NES Remix games which offered alternative takes on classic games, World Championships is laser-focused on multiplayer and high score-chasing.

But World Championships: NES Edition

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Deluxe Set

£49.99$59.99$59.99

The Switch title features over 150 speedrunning challenges, with various levels of difficulty, across 13 classic NES titles, including Super Mario Bros., Zelda, Metroid, Donkey Kong and Kirby’s Adventure. These challenges range from simple 5-second dashes to grab Super Mario Bros.’ first mushroom, to expert challenges like beating the entire game without getting hit – all against the clock.

Players start off in Speedrun Mode, which is essentially a practice run for each of the game’s 150+ challenges. Here, players are challenged with completing many bite-sized challenges across the 13 NES titles, such as grabbing the first items in The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 3 or The Lost Levels, as fast as possible.

The default game display has your personal best ghost running side-by-side with live gameplay, encouraging you to race with yourself. Players will be rewarded with a ranking for hitting certain milestones, as well as coins for spending on a large selection of player icons and new Speedrun challenges, and profile ‘pins’ for achieving great feats.

Even though most of the challenges are simple, reaching high-rank times can be surprisingly tough. Thankfully, everything is designed to make fast replays as easy and painless as possible, with players able to instantly quit or restart a challenge by pressing the shoulder buttons. That means that, even when quitting and retrying dozens of times in pursuit of the highest S rank, the experience is rarely frustrating, and improvement always feels within reach.

But as compelling as it is to work through the Speedrun Mode challenges, unlocking new trials and achieving high ranks, they’re ultimately just a warmup for World Championships’ main event, which is its excellent local multiplayer mode.

In Party Mode, the two gameplay screens of the solo challenges are replaced by up to eight, as players compete in frantic speedruns which often measure success in milliseconds. It’s here where the game transforms from a fairly straightforward (though slickly executed) high-score package, into something that feels more unique.

“Thankfully, everything is designed to make fast replays as easy and painless as possible, with players able to instantly quit a challenge by pressing both triggers, and swiftly reinitiate it with the press of a button.”

Multiplayer allows a group of players to compete simultaneously in either individual challenges or a large selection of themed packs based on individual games or specific styles of challenge.

One pack, for example, is themed entirely around clearing levels in Super Mario Bros. 3. There are more packs that incorporate multiple games and, thankfully, there’s the option of a practice run to help younger players (and older ones who didn’t quite master Excite Bike) familiarize themselves with the controls.

In packs, players get points depending on their finishing place. If you fail or mess up during gameplay, your screen will rewind. There is also the option to give up using both triggers, which will forfeit any points for that round.

With other players, suddenly the simplicity of the easier challenges starts to make sense, as yelps and cheers erupt as competitors beat each other by tenths of a second in the race to grab Metroid’s morph ball, plummet down to a door in Mario Bros. 2, or clear the first stage of Donkey Kong.

For more experienced players, there are longer, tougher challenges. One such challenge is Lost Legend, a super tough Lost Levels Mario level which requires pinpoint jumping and momentum. Another requires players to finish the first dungeon in Zelda, or complete the escape sequence in Metroid.

In these tougher challenges, World Championships’ suite of help options comes in handy. Every challenge in the game shows a video preview of how to complete it, but these more complex challenges also have full, magazine-style guides called Classified Information, which show annotated maps with the best route through the level. It’s a great touch and, in combination with the irresistibly 80s soundtrack, makes for a wonderful presentation.

There’s no doubt that in local multiplayer World Championships is a blast. Gameplay is competitive, tense, and frequently hilarious, with players often neck-and-neck throughout, and a single slip-up deciding the winner. For a certain niche of players, this is going to prove a real hit: I can already imagine the game becoming a regular rotation at my previous employer, which houses many game developers of a certain age.

It’s beyond the sofa where the package is, sadly, less impressive. World Championships’ remaining two modes focus on online connectivity, but compared to other modern challenge games, the online features here feel disappointingly lacking.

Survival mode is the only area of the game in which you can compete with other online players simultaneously. Here, you compete alone against the ghost data of seven other online players across three different Speedrun challenges. After each challenge, half of the ‘players’ are eliminated until there’s a single winner.

Just like local multiplayer, competing against other players’ ghost data is far more tense and competitive than the solo challenges, and exactly what we wanted more of from this game. However, frustratingly, players are limited to just two ‘divisions’ per week, comprising of three pre-defined challenges each. There’s no option to compete against player ghosts anywhere else in the game, which is a real shame because it works brilliantly.

“World Championships’ remaining two modes focus on online connectivity, but compared to similar games within the genre, the online features here feel disappointingly lacking.”

There’s no online support for Party Mode either, which is understandable given that success is often measured in tenths-of-a-second, meaning latency is crucial, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of ghost player data outside of Survival Mode’s weekly challenges.

The other online mode, World Championships (which you can watch in our video here), is similarly limited. Here, players compete in five Speedrun challenges, which are rotated once a week. Your best times in these challenges will be logged, and at the end of the week, world rankings and birth-year rankings will be announced.

However, inexplicably, before the weekly challenges are rotated, players are not shown any kind of records from other players – friends or otherwise – for any of the challenges, which means you’re essentially competing with yourself in the dark, just like the Speedrun Mode, with no indication of how other players have done.

This criticism applies to the entire Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition package: bafflingly, none of the individual Speedrun challenges in the game display any kind of high score or leaderboard from online players. Not even the players on your friends list are listed, which feels like a huge omission from this kind of game.

But World Championships: NES Edition

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Deluxe Set

£49.99$59.99$59.99

That means, other than replays released after the weekly challenges have ended, there’s no way of watching other players’ runs, either. Sometimes in Survival Mode, a competing player ghost would beat us by a significant margin, and it was frustrating not to be able to see how they did it.

I suppose in this sense, it’s an authentic 80s experience, before the internet existed when players had to send their scores into magazines and wait, but it’s very disappointing for a modern challenge game. We’re sure, post-release, YouTube and social media will fill some of the gap left by the launch game, but it still feels like something players shouldn’t have to leave the game to find.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a charming and nostalgic compilation of Speedrun challenges that’s heavily focused on local multiplayer. With friends, it’s a blast. Retro enthusiasts looking to play alone will still find a decent amount of content, but they’ll need to be able to overlook the disappointing number of online features.

A copy of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition was provided for review by Nintendo.